Thought Police

The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) are the secret police of Oceania in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime and thought-criminals. They use psychology and omnipresent surveillance (such as telescreens) to monitor, search, find and arrest members of society who could potentially challenge authority and status quo, even only by thought, hence the name Thought Police. They use terror and torture to achieve their ends.

It also had much to do with Orwell's own "power of facing unpleasant facts," as he called it, and his willingness to criticize prevailing ideas which brought him into conflict with others and their "smelly little orthodoxies."

Read more about Thought Police:  Operations, Other Uses

Famous quotes containing the words thought and/or police:

    He thought that, because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than the individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many, and is not the many themselves.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)